Objectives/ topics of the visit(s):

NGA Rollout (Fibre), Financing and State Aids

Although UK broadband policy is formally reserved to London, both Scotland and Wales have a degree of autonomy and have been allocated a share of BDUK funding. Scotland faces difficult deployment problems because it has a high proportion of sparsely populated land with difficult mountainous terrain. An ingenious solution and possible best practice for similar regions was demonstrated by Prof Peter Buneman based on locally developed wireless connections. Although very cost effective if highlighted the major difficulty of superfast backhaul (which it solved by connecting to the local Educational network)

Wales is in the process of a major broadband procurement exercise which prevented Welsh government officials from fully participating in the GL meeting. The procurement procedure is expected to realise the Digital Agenda target by providing all households in Wales with a 30Mbps connection by 2015.

Digital Services

The Edinburgh meeting showcased two advanced digital service infrastructures. First in education ,the University of the Highlands. This has been established to bring tertiary education to a wide sparsely populated area and is doing so by exploiting the tools of e-learning to bring teaching to multiple local communities. A key infrastructure support in the UK's Janet academic network (part of the EU Géant network) which brings high bandwidth backhaul to the Highland area). The second is the Scottish e-health network which is one of the most advanced in Europe.